With every year that passes, I get further away from my target audience, and while I've been happy to think of myself as a father figure to these kids, I'd be a little distressed to be thought of as a grandfather figure.
A children's author on a soapbox is not a pleasant sight but I have become drawn into issues, slightly unwillingly, relating to young people, literacy and youth justice: just look at the number of young people we have locked up in prison, and the uselessness of it.
I love the idea that magic and witchcraft and battles between supernatural creatures could be raging all around us but just out of our sight.
You like to think with young adults that with your books, a little part of it has reached them and will stay with them. It is great to be part of an eight-year-old's world.
Everywhere, publishers are being squeezed out.
Writing about magic is harder than writing about spies because you're dealing with something that doesn't really exist.
